“The road to Maine?”
“How successful you are as a distributor directly correlates with the rewards that accrue to the creator of what you distribute (see the cable industry). How successful you are as a creator correlates with your value to the distributor and or the end consumer (see HBO and ESPN). In the end someone pays someone on an item basis, on a channel basis, or a bundle basis. It’s interesting (in the quantum at least) that ESPN just paid the NFL a $19 billion nut for one live event per week for the next 10 or so years). They did it because of direct (ads), indirect (carriage fees) and halo (schedule tentpole) revenues. So the question arises…who pays Facebook the money that pays the creator in some other mechanism than low single digit CPM. …. Sharing is dandy but paying is better.”
GroupM’s Rob Norman with a somewhat trad take on Facebook’s media-hub announcement — via Digiday’s rapid response piece — but it leads me to think that FBK wants to be an audience broker more than a distributor. They won’t own the content (or license rights), and they won’t schedule or program content for the end user, a la Fred Silverman or Anna Wintour.
Instead, they are creating a global marketplace of 700MM (potentially 1B users), with a cross-platform currency which can be used to access various digital experiences and goods. And FBK doesn’t care if you call it football or futebol, ice hockey or roller hockey, horse shoes or cow chip tossing… water will find its way and audiences will aggregate across the social graph. The question is if Facebook will collect just the crumbs as money moves from producer to user, or if they will get a full 50% markup.
